Efficient One-Pot Synthesis of Water-Compatible Molecularly Imprinted Polymer Microspheres by Facile RAFT Precipitation Polymerization

摘要

Molecular imprinting is a versatile and straightforward method for the preparation of polymer receptors with tailor-made recognition sites. Despite the tremendous progress made in this field, many challenges still remain to be addressed. In particular, it has been shown that the presently developed molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) are normally only organic solvent compatible and they mostly fail to show specific template bindings in pure aqueous solutions, thus significantly limiting their practical applications in the field of biotechnology. Although some approaches, which either use specifically designed functional monomers or apply the conventional imprinting protocol, have been developed for the preparation of MIPs with molecular recognition ability under aqueous conditions, versatile approaches for the preparation of MIPs that are applicable in pure aqueous environments are still rare.